Not up to date with the thread but here are my reviews then I am going back to catch up on what everyone else has been reading.
22 A Stranger City, Linda Grant
Set in London around the time of the Brexit vote, this novel follows a number of interwoven characters, with the common thread being an unidentified woman found drowned in the Thames. Many of the stories contain stories of immigration, of leaving one place and trying to settle and make a life in another. At times it feels rich and warm, full of diversity and humanity; at others, cold and precarious. Some people just disappear. It's mostly realistic and then, suddenly, it isn't - there are Dickensian prison ships moored in the Thames, and deportation trains that run through the night. These slips into speculative fiction come and go, creating a strange dream-like atmosphere. The plot meanders, deliberately wrong-footing the reader - there's always a lot going on, but it's more about emotion and feeling than about what happens. I enjoyed this.
23 A Bright Ray of Darkness, Ethan Hawke
Yes, that Ethan Hawke.
On the plus side, he can write. The writing here about acting (especially acting Shakespeare on the stage) and about being an actor is electrifying.
On the minus side.... ugh, so much masculinity in crisis. The main character is William, a 30-something actor whose marriage is disintegrating after he cheats on his rock star wife (see footnote). He spends a lot of time feeling sorry for himself, resenting his wife (while not accepting his part in the break-up), doing drugs and drinking too much, sleeping with an endless supply of young women who are all tits and no personality. And then all these other men troop through the narrative making looooong (like pages of it, paragraph after paragraph) speeches about their philosophies. And William says things like "Shit, this baby [a sports car] had a 440 under the hood and only twelve hundred miles on it. It was a work of art, more sexual than Marilyn Monroe in black lace panties holding a Bazooka".
I know, it's a character. It's a pose. But still.... yuk. There's just so MUCH of this in the world already. Could we maybe have something a bit different?
All that said, I read this book cover to cover in a few hours and absolutely loved the 50% or so where he's talking about acting.
Note: There's an uncomfortable thread of autobiography running through this. I didn't know until I looked him up on Wikipedia that Hawke reportedly cheated on Uma Thurman while away filming on location. William cheats on his wife while away filming on location. He describes feeling lonely and emasculated as his wife, a musician, is training hard to get in shape for her latest video. Which doesn't make a huge amount of sense within the narrative - do musicians really need to do a load of intense personal training to ride motorcycles and swim in shark tanks? Then you read that Hawke and Thurman separated in 2003, the year that Kill Bill came out. Oh.
DNF Weyward, Emilia Hart
Sorry, I hated it (well, the few chapters I read). Cartoon villain men, descriptions full of inaccuracies and anomalies, awful clunky dialogue and worst of all - BORING. I can read most things if they are fun and/or interesting but this just wasn't. Moving on.